RKM - Mesh

This panel can be seen as the “heart and soul” of the “RealFlow RenderKit Mesh” plugin and here you can see everything you need to control the mesh's polygons.

We recommend reading the → “RKM - Quick Start” chapter for a brief workflow description.

3DS	C4D	HOU	LWV	MYA	XSI
Polygon Size	Polygon Size	Polygon Size	Polygon Size	Polygon Size	Polygon Size
Weight Normalization	Weight Normalization	Weight Normalization	Weight Normalization	Weight Normalization	Weight Normalization
Smooth	Smooth	Smooth	Smooth	Smooth	Smooth
Surface Proximity	Surface Proximity	Surface Proximity	Surface Proximity	Surface Proximity	Surface Proximity
Type	Type	Type	Type	Type	Type
Fix Bounding Box	Fix Bounding Box	Fix Bounding Box	Fix Bounding Box	Fix Bounding Box	Fix Bounding Box
Axis	Axis	Axis	Axis	Axis	Axis
	Scale		Scale
	Blur Length
		Viewport LOD
			Use Custom Surface
	Share all frames (Team Render)

Polygon size

This parameter is responsible for the mesh's level of detail. The smaller this value, the more polygons will be added to represent the fluid's shape.

Weight Normalization

If you need a more accurate representation of the particle cloud, please switch this parameter to “Yes”.

Smooth

Very high “Smooth” settings have an effect similar to strong filtering. If the value is too high, the mesh starts to look unnatural and many details will be lost. Please bear in mind that “Smooth” directly depends on “Polygon size” and high “Smooth” values can increase the mesh creation time significantly.

Surface proximity

When a mesh is created the engine adds spheres to represent the particles. “Surface proximity” defines the distance of the mesh's surface polygons from these spheres. This way it is possible to create thicker or thinner meshes.

Type

You can choose from three types:

“Metaballs” can be seen as spheres which can influence one another to create an organic-looking, smooth surface. Metaball-based fluid meshes often show thick borders and require a certain amount of filtering or correspondingly high particle counts to achieve a better quality.
“Weighted isotropic” is another option and suited for a wide variety of meshing tasks, because it is the best compromise between creation time and quality. This mode yields smooth meshes with slightly rounded borders. Filters can help to improve the mesh.
“Weighted anisotropic” creates meshes with thin borders, but sometimes the fluid has a torn look. To compensate for this effect, the “Radius” parameter of the “Particle Files” panel should be increased. Please use moderate filtering with this option.

Fix Bound Box

With this option switched on it is possible to eliminate the mesh flicker.

Axis

This option tells the RFRK which axis will serve as the scene's height axis. With the wrong setup, imported particles will be tilted around 90 degrees:

YXZ → Lightwave, Cinema 4D
ZXY → 3D Studio MAX, Maya
YZX → Softimage, Maya, Houdini

Scale (C4D, LWV)

This option can be used to change the global scale of the imported particle sequence.

Blur length (C4D)

With this value it is possible to control the length of the motion blur streaks. The parameter acts like a multiplier.

Viewport LOD (HOU)

Here you can adjust how many polygons you want to display in the viewport. With "100", the entire number of polygons will be shown, with "30" only 30%, and so on.

Use custom surface (LWV)

If you want to apply a custom surface definition to the mesh, please check this option. With the associated "Custom surface (.srf)" button you can open a file browser and load the desired file.

Share all Frames (Team Render) (C4D)

With Cinema 4D R15, a dynamic download of assets is not supported, and in this case it is mandatory for the clients to download all RealFlow elements. To do this, please open the plugin, and activate this option. With R16 this limitation has been removed, and it is not necessary to use the download method.